Codewhisperer vs GitHub Copilot

Amazon CodeWhisperer (now part of Amazon Q Developer) and GitHub Copilot are the two enterprise-backed AI coding assistants from major cloud providers.

Overview

Amazon CodeWhisperer is Amazon's AI code completion tool, now integrated into Amazon Q Developer. It provides inline suggestions with a focus on AWS services, includes built-in security scanning, and offers reference tracking for open-source code attribution. GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI and provides inline completions, chat, and GitHub ecosystem integration. It is the market leader in AI code assistants with the largest user base.

Key Differences

AWS integration: CodeWhisperer excels at writing AWS SDK code, CloudFormation templates, and CDK constructs. If you work heavily with AWS services, its suggestions for AWS-specific patterns are noticeably better. Security scanning: CodeWhisperer includes built-in security scanning that detects vulnerabilities in generated code and suggests fixes. Copilot does not include integrated security scanning. Reference tracking: CodeWhisperer flags when suggestions match open-source code and provides the license and repository reference. This helps with compliance and attribution requirements. General code quality: Copilot generally produces better suggestions for non-AWS code across a wider range of languages and frameworks. Its training data and model are more comprehensive. IDE support: Copilot supports VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, and Visual Studio. CodeWhisperer supports VS Code, JetBrains, and AWS Cloud9. Ecosystem: Copilot integrates with GitHub (PRs, Actions, CLI). CodeWhisperer integrates with the broader Amazon Q suite (console help, documentation, troubleshooting).

Pricing

CodeWhisperer's Individual tier is free with generous limits. Professional tier is $19/month per user. Copilot Individual is $10/month, Business is $19/month per user.

Verdict

Choose CodeWhisperer if you work primarily with AWS services and want built-in security scanning and code reference tracking. Choose Copilot if you want the best general-purpose AI completions across all languages and frameworks.